Mesmerized by the outline of a shadow cast by a phantom
This torn wet-smelling hallucination of the body
a pitiful remnant torn from weak old fingers.
The smoke trembling under the roof
The sound of wind against the elm
The thin perilous condition of negative entropy
Discourse is not life
Its time is not ours
These are the arrows that kill sleep in the night at all hours
The flood is gone, the ebb has come.

We infer, rather than perceive
The remembered present
The harvesting of ruins
A regress that always ends in darkness
Finite provinces of meaning
The moment already far away
Blind keys spin
Horns echo backward
Time is an abyss.

I cannot tell the true riddle of my own self
The great fleet of thorns
The tumult of inner voices
Mindlessly persisting
The hours that assail all things
Every second is a cage
Every action is a cage
Every reason is a cage
Anguish is alone
Its supposed companion a ghost.

Disposable morphology
Caving in the cage of my body
Sarcophagus full of black water
The galling sense of intolerable restraint
Straying through an infinite nothing
Wasted youth chained to this tomb
Torn away from that self who could do more
Yearning to crawl in among the machinery
Rain over black algae
Charred crucibles.

New vermin blood in old vermin skin
That true secret whispered to a fence of reeds
Driven over the bones of the dead
Repetition like a curse
Ice moving across the earth
Tangled within a feedback loop
Worms in spacetime
Knotted by habit
What shapes do we express?
We are the damned, damned by the will to live.

White stone in the white sunlight
The labyrinth of remembrance
The empty stony maze
Killing memories with a sharpened awl
Killing the moments to come
Beyond good and evil
Beyond freedom and dignity
No standard, no security, no simple acquiescence
I am in Athens and Pericles is young.